Washington Post Reporter John Pomfret Holds Talk on Modern Chinese History

September 02, 2008 |

Washington Post reporter John Pomfret will discuss the tortuous past 40 years of China’s reinvention at a free, public lecture on Tuesday, September 2, at 7:30 p.m. in Goucher College’s Kraushaar Auditorium. The author will also sign books afterward.

Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China was assigned as Goucher’s 2008 summer reading for incoming first-year and transfer students. For more information about the event, please call 410-337-6333.

As part of the first generation of American college students to enroll in exchange programs with Chinese universities in the early 1980s, then as an Associated Press reporter covering the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square and later as the Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post, Pomfret witnessed one of the great political and social upheavals of modern time. Chinese Lessons is a rich, first-hand account of modern Chinese history as it was lived and experienced by the author and five of his classmates at Nanjing University in 1981.

His classmates were the children of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, convulsive political purges unleashed by Mao Zedong. They came from villages and cities; some were Red Guards; others were beaten by Red Guards; some had siblings who starved to death; some witnessed — and sometimes were forced to act as accomplices to — the humiliation, torture, and even deaths of their own parents.

But by 1978, Pomfret’s classmates had returned from village outposts and labor camps and successfully tested into college. They graduated and constituted the first generation in Communist China’s history who were free to pursue their own courses of action. Some went into business; many joined the Communist Party; some were exiled for their political views; others went overseas and found other things, including religion.

Pomfret kept track of some of his classmates and over the years looked up others to find out how they had fared. In Chinese Lessons, he brings to life their personal tales — sometimes poignant, sometimes distressing, sometimes repulsive — of navigating China’s market-oriented reforms. All of their stories paint a rich portrait of change and conflict in a China that has gone from narrow totalitarianism and conformity to an era of relaxed authoritarianism and diversity.

Raised in New York City and educated at Stanford and Nanjing universities, Pomfret is an award-winning journalist with The Washington Post. He has been a foreign correspondent for 15 years, covering wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Congo, Sri Lanka, Iraq, southwestern Turkey, and northeastern Iran. Pomfret has spent seven years covering China — one in the late 1980s during the Tiananmen Square protests and then from 1998 until the end of 2003 as the bureau chief for The Washington Post in Beijing.

In 2003, Pomfret was awarded the Osborne Elliot Award for the best coverage of Asia by the Asia Society. He is married to a Chinese entrepreneur and has two children. Chinese Lessons is his first book.